Sam Neill is an avid wine collector and owns a winery in Queenstown, New Zealand and two others in Alexandra. His Queenstown location is called Two Paddocks, which he claims is a labor of love and not a profitable vocation due to the amount of money it takes to run a winery and the heavy time consumption.

During the middle part of the 1980s, Neill was in contention to replace Roger Moore as James Bond but lost out to Timothy Dalton, who played the legendary super spy for two films. Neill’s screen-test for the role can be found online or in the Special features to Dalton’s first film, The Living Daylights.